I work in a 35 storeys building where more than 100 other offices are operating too. The building has 3 floors of parking with 300+ parking spaces and each office has been allocated specific locations with Entry Access Cards to the parking area. In recent days a lot of people are parking at spots not issued to them (because of convenience of staying closer to exit gate) which causes problems for the people who want to park at their dedicated locations however those are occupied by the violators on daily basis.

"Why it is happening too much" I inquired the security staff.

"Saab kia karoon, daily 10 say 15 log ghalat parking ker datay hain"

(what can I do sir, daily 10 to 15 people park in unallocated places)

"How do you control these violators?"

"Saab, I place a paper notice on the violating car's front screen so that they read it and then don't violate again but people still repeat!"

"With a high frequency of violations you must be spending a lot of time listening to complaints (sometimes harsh comments) from the original owner of parking-space, moving from one floor to another floor, placing violation notice and arranging temporary locations for the right owners causing stress for you and depriving you to focus on your prime job which is to ensure the security, right?

"Resolving parking problems is also my job Sir, what can I do sir?"

And then I told him that there are two ways of handling problems in life. One is to fix them by taking the corrective actions (which he was already doing); the other is to prevent problems so that they do now occur in first place!!!

Later, I suggested the building management to send a notification to all the offices that any parking violation will be subject to fine of 300AED so their employees need to be aware of this new law enforcement in order to avoid any penalty.

The guard is a happy man now :)

Flash!!!:

While you think you are fixing things in life, you may overlook the fact that fixing things is still draining your time, cost and energies. You can improve on your time, cost and efforts efficiency by ensuring that certain problems do not occur at first place. This simply requires root cause analysis using your proactive approach to avoid problems taking birth or at the time of first bad occurrence of event; and then ensuring the implementation of right policies and procedures to their prevention. Happiness will be yours then!